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YouTube Creator Blog: WE’LL DO IT LIVE: YouTube live streaming expanding to more channels: "YouTube Live allows you to offer your audience a great viewing experience, with great streaming quality and instant scalability and reliability. Here are some key features: You get real-time transcoding in the cloud, so you only need to send us your highest quality stream and we make it instantly available in all resolutions and device formats You can show multiple camera angles, add closed captions, and insert ads and slates Viewers can watch the live stream from any device, get the best quality constantly adjusting to their Internet connection, and can skip back and forth in the live stream" (read more at link above)

AOL vs. Netflix: The Entire Internet In One Simple Chart: "At the end of March, almost 2.7 million people still subscribed to AOL service, the company reported this morning. That’s about where Netflix stood at the end of 2004. Since then, Netflix’s subscriber base has grown — 29 million at the end of March — and AOL’s has declined at a remarkably parallel rate. But that makes perfect sense: Nothing says “dialup” more than AOL, and few services have benefited more from the growth of broadband than Netflix. (The paths cross in early 2008, just as Netflix’s streaming video service was starting to take off.)"

Startups Are Bringing Creative Features To The Small Screen In Hopes Of Luring Iphone, Android Users Away From The Default Browser | MIT Technology Review: " . . . According to data from Net Applications’ NetMarketShare, Apple’s Safari browser captured nearly 61 percent of the mobile browser market in January, while Google’s Android browser had more than 21 percent. (Google recently started including its Chrome browser on high-end Androiddevices, but Chrome’s market percentage is still tiny, according to NetMarketShare.) Opera Software’s Opera Mini browser came in third with about 10 percent of the market . . . . Could too many alternative mobile browsers be a bad thing? Hagiu thinks so if each browser requires website makers to optimize their sites differently. On the other hand, if mobile browser companies adhere to a common set of Web standards, such as HTML5, this is unlikely to be an issue. Right now, four out of every five minutes devoted to media consumption on a smartphone are spent using apps, according to data from comScore, while just one minute is consumed by mobile Web surfing. Eventually, the proportion is likely to change as websites are revamped for the smaller touch screens and as mobile gadgets become more powerful computers. . . ."

Siri, Google Now, and the End of Apps | MIT Technology Review: "If Siri gets more powerful people will have little use for many apps. A job ad posted by Apple for a UI engineer to work on Siri nicely summarizes the potential of its virtual assistant, and Google’s closest equivalent, Google Now, to redefine how we use mobile devices: “Consider it an entire miniature OS [operating system] within the OS.” The implication is that rather than being an app used in certain circumstances, Siri should be thought of a general purpose tool to achieve just about anything. I suspect the people in charge of Google Now’s development have similar ideas. Virtual helpers conceived along those lines could transform how people get stuff done with a smartphone, and remove the need for them to interact with the apps and websites they must turn to today. Right now, Apple and Google’s operating systems are platforms on top of which the things a person needs sit. Achieving something involves a collection of apps, and often the Web, that users customize. The operating system just makes it possible to go to the places you need to go. If Apple and Google make their virtual assistants really work, that could be replaced by a much more centralized approach. Want something? Ask Siri or turn to Google Now and they’ll do the work of dealing with all those Web pages and apps for you." (read more at link above)

Digital Set to Surpass TV in Time Spent with US Media - eMarketer: "The average adult will spend over 5 hours per day online, on nonvoice mobile activities or with other digital media this year, eMarketer estimates, compared to 4 hours and 31 minutes watching television. Daily TV time will actually be down slightly this year, while digital media consumption will be up 15.8%.
The most significant growth area is on mobile. Adults will spend an average of 2 hours and 21 minutes per day on nonvoice mobile activities, including mobile internet usage on phones and tablets—longer than they will spend online on desktop and laptop computers, and nearly an hour more than they spent on mobile last year."

Cablevision CEO on a Possible Sale and the Online Future of TV - The Hollywood Reporter: " . . . Discussing the future of TV, the 58-year-old said that "there could come a day" when Cablevision stops offering TV channels and offers broadband as its primary service. Dolan argued that the cable industry was living in a "bubble" with its focus on TV packages that people must pay for as offered.
Dolan acknowledged that he watches TV only on rare occasions, according to the Journal. It quoted him as saying that he often watches with his young children, who prefer to watch Netflix via Cablevision's broadband service. . . ."

Patreon Raises $2.1M for Its Automatic Tip Jar - Liz Gannes - Commerce - AllThingsD: " . . . having labeled the age of advertising as a hundred-year blip, Conte is ready to bring patronage back. Goodbye ads, hello automatic tip jars. Conte himself now makes precisely $6,153 for every video he posts to YouTube, with 835 loyal fans pledging between $1 and $100 per item. That’s about a hundred times more than what he had expect to make from the same video with YouTube advertising, he said. (Here’s his latest from this week, a dance-y tune made with a music controller set on top of a sideways television displaying custom animations, captured with a camera phone on a robotic crane.) . . ."

Netflix will switch from Silverlight to HTML5, explains what it's waiting for first: "Due to Microsoft's confirmation that support for its Silverlight plugin will end and the rise of plugin-free browsers, Netflix will eventually need to stream to PCs using something other than the tech it's had in place since 2008. The company has already implemented one example of the technology for Samsung's ARM Chromebooks, and plans to bring it to Chrome on PCs and Macs eventually."

Why YouTube buffers: The secret deals that make—and break—online video | Ars Technica: " . . . cynical types who suspect their Internet Service Providers (ISPs) intentionally degrade streaming video may be right as well. No, your ISP (probably) isn't sniffing your traffic every time you click a YouTube or Netflix link, ready to throttle your bandwidth. But behind the scenes, in negotiations that almost never become public, the world's biggest Internet providers and video services argue over how much one network should pay to connect to another. When these negotiations fail, users suffer. In other words, bad video performance is often caused not just by technology problems but also by business decisions made by the companies that control the Internet. . . ."

Google TV: We're not dead (yet) | Internet & Media - CNET News: "the low-powered, affordable, plug-and-play HDMI Chromecast dongle could be a ferocious hit. Pre-orders already have had their shipping dates pushed back, and we know that a system update is in the offing. Google demonstrated a feature, currently in beta, which will let you stream any Web page to your TV. This circumvents the requirement to build a site or app with the Google Cast SDK, drastically lowering the developer bar while giving end users a cool feature."

Google’s Solution to Bringing Online Video to TV | MIT Technology Review: . . . . Queiroz stressed that any device—whether or not it was made by Google or is running the company’s software—can work with a Chromecast. “We will not force you to have the same operating system on all your devices.” He demonstrated how the YouTube app for iPhone could be used to send content to a TV with a Chromecast plugged in, and said any laptop using a Web video player with Chromecast enabled would be able to use the device.
Queiroz said more content announcements are on the way. “Our goal is to partner to create an ecosystem of apps as well as devices,” he said, claiming that developers of mobile and Web apps would need to make only minor changes to their existing apps to make them compatible.
Queiroz also hinted that the technology inside the Chromecast might soon appear inside other products. Adding the technology to television sets might make sense for both Google and TV manufacturers. “This is the first instantiation of Googlecast; over time we expect the functionality to be embedded in a range of devices,” said Queiroz. . . .
(read more at link above)

Popular streaming channels:Netflix: The king of movie and TV show streaming. $7.99/mo.
YouTube: User-submitted videos and some original programming. Free.
Hulu Plus: TV shows days after they air and some movies. $7.99/mo.
Amazon Prime: A strong Netflix competitor with other Amazon benefits. $79/year.
Crackle: Movies and TV mostly from Sony's library. Free.
Vudu: Movie rental site owned by Walmart. Fees per movie